Helping a life insurance company evolve into a financial services brand
Success Stories | Helping a life insurance company evolve into a financial services brand

Helping a life insurance company evolve into a financial services brand

Our senior leadership team needed something they could trust, that would provide forward-looking insight to help inform marketing and brand strategy. After distrusting the old metric system, the new monthly report has become widely used.

Business Issue

A financial services firm needed a reliable, comprehensive set of brand metrics to monitor its evolution from a life insurance company to a financial planning firm with a full suite of insurance, annuity and investment products. Leadership wanted to measure its brand and top competitors across a range of dimensions including awareness, consideration and willingness to speak to a rep, as well as a battery of brand image ratings. The goal was to inform and measure the impact of the firm’s advertising and events marketing strategy by building a sustainable, state-of-the-art brand tracking program.

What We Did

Escalent proposed a continuous-field design to quickly identify market movements among the competition. We profiled a dozen brands every month for two target customer segments. At launch, we baselined present market position against an expanded list of competitors, and we revamped the brand attributes used for measuring image to better align with the strategic shift in focus and competitive set. The continuous survey design allowed us to periodically incorporate an ad-test module to quickly measure the client’s and competitors’ creative executions.

Result

The baseline results revealed that the client had already made substantial progress migrating its brand image. We discovered that the traditional event marketing strategy was too narrowly focused, and the client’s emphasis on promoting its captive financial planning representatives turned out to be the least impactful differentiator in the category. We also learned that the event-centric marketing spend was less effective at sustaining brand awareness and consideration throughout the year, prompting our client to divert resources to digital investments to support its marketing goals.

Explore our thinking on Brand Elements

Show All

Explore our thinking on Brand Evolution

Show All

Explore our thinking on Brand Positioning

Show All

Keep me informed. I’d like to receive occasional newsletters, event notifications, and thought leadership materials.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter